obama and the democrats generally benefit from that calculation. heather: so not quite as good as it seems. >> it's not quite as good as it seems, but there is a recovery. however, they did revise the number of new jobs for the previous two months, so that's not quite as much of a recovery. i think we can say it's an anemic recovery. heather: were you surprised that sandy didn't have more of an impact after causing $60 billion in damages? >> i'm not surprised at all. the typical pattern is when you have a natural disaster like that, whatever you lose in the way of jobs you gain back and then some in the rebuilding jobs. heather: okay. tax hikes in january, can this economy handle it based on this report? >> we're going to have taxes which will be roughly the same under bill clinton, we did fine in that, we'll do fine. what i'm worried about is the defense cuts. they're really serious. but we'll get by with a few months of higher taxes until the democrats and republicans start playing nice with each other. but the fiscal cliff, i think, is very over